There May be No Winner in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray Wars

I've been posting off and on (here, here, here, and here) about the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray wars, and I have not really covered what might be an increasingly likely outcome, that both formats may lose.

While I think that HD-DVD may do better in the long fun, given Sony's (and not Disney's) anal retentive and counter productive licensing and marketing strategies, it may very well be that these will be irrelevant in a home entertainment context, though they might still duke it out in areas like backup formats and software distribution.

Given technologies out there, I got FIOS a month ago, and one of the side benefits is a digital TV tuner which allows for on-demand content, which is about the same price as going to the Video store, I'm wondering whether online high definition will be the eventual winner.

Given that the additional resolution is hard to notice on a typical TV, and that much of the motivation for the higher definition DVD formats is content control, which from an end user perspective is basically screwing the consumer, perhaps these two formats will simply be bumps on the road to digital distribution.

While there are a lot of people on without online access, or on dialup, who have DVDs, the overwhelming majority of those who would go with a high def DVD format already have broadband, so why bother with media at all. One can go with a digital library.